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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
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Jules Romains
From Verdun: The Prelude (1938)
Translated by Gerard Hopkins
When the industry of a nation is all directed to the single end of keeping a war going, it is its own people that it is paying; how the payment is made, therefore, doesn’t very much matter. There is no reason why the women, the children, and the aged shouldn’t be mobilized for labour, as their husbands, their fathers, and their sons are mobilized for death. The essential thing is to force the soil to produce enough ore and enough foodstuffs to supply the army, while at the same time guaranteeing the civilian population against starvation…
But if victory is to be sure, attrition must not be confined to the enemy’s armies. It must extend to his rear as well. The rapid destruction of his front-line troops is but one aspect of the problem. It is necessary to calculate also the progress made by cold and hunger among his civilian population, the exhaustion of the natural resources of his country.
This is so to such an extent that the “front,” in all its ramifications, tends to become the locality where two national agglomerations devour one another without thought of economy, without keeping anything back. The whole life, down to its most secret resources, of the two warring groups becomes concentrated there, strung out along the open wound of the trenches, to be swallowed up in the blazing inferno which is common to both of them. The whole problem is reduced to knowing on which side the exhaustion will be most rapid, will produce in the foundations on which the life of a country rests the greatest number of cavities or perforations, the most virulent mortification, the most certain preliminaries of crumbling and collapse. Which of the two stretched surfaces will be the first to tear and reveal the deepest holes, or will subside in consequence of the sudden liquefaction, so to speak, of the social structure?
Is it not for just such an end that the supreme commander on either side must wait in patience? – always hoping, of course, that the rot will work more quickly in the ranks opposite than in his own, doing everything he can to shorten the period of waiting, ever counting on some happy accident to hasten the process, neglecting no opportunity of snatching an unexpected chance of victory, trying to pretend all the while that he still believes in the Napoleonic myths which fed his spirit in the early days – the crushing or envelopment of the enemy in the open field, the war of movement and manoeuvre, in which the general becomes once more the chess-player with his flashes of genius, and is not merely the engineer-in-chief of an Attrition Factory.
One way out there might have been: peace – a fantastic mental aberration in the minds of the peoples concerned which might lead them to say to themselves: “Is it absolutely essential that we fight this business out to its bitter end? War is not now, even if it ever was, what we thought it would be. Since it is obvious that neither side can succeed in exhausting the other without at the same time exhausting itself almost as much, and since the distinguishing characteristic of modern warfare seems to be that it will never come to an end of itself, why shouldn’t we look for some other solution? Even a bad peace would be an untold blessing for the world at large.”
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